Sigmund Freud - 29 major books and articles

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THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF A CASE OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN A WOMAN

(1920)

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THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF A CASE OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN A WOMAN

I

Homosexuality in women, which is certainly not less common than in men, although much less glaring, has
not only been ignored by the law, but has also been neglected by psycho-analytic research. The narration
of a single case, not too pronounced in type, in which it was possible to trace its origin and development in
the mind with complete certainty and almost without a gap may, therefore, have a certain claim to attention.
If this presentation of it furnishes only the most general outlines of the various events concerned and of the
conclusions reached from a study of the case, while suppressing all the characteristic details on which the
interpretation is founded, this limitation is easily to be explained by the medical discretion necessary in
discussing a recent case.

A beautiful and clever girl of eighteen, belonging to a family of good standing, had aroused displeasure
and concern in her parents by the devoted adoration with which she pursued a certain ‘society lady' who
was about ten years older than herself. The parents asserted that, in spite of her distinguished name, this
lady was nothing but a cocotte. It was well known, they said, that she lived with a friend, a married woman,
and had intimate relations with her, while at the same time she carried on promiscuous affairs with a
number of men. The girl did not contradict these evil reports, but neither did she allow them to interfere with
her worship of the lady, although she herself was by no means lacking in a sense of decency and propriety.
No prohibitions and no supervision hindered the girl from seizing every one of her rare opportunities of
being together with her beloved, of ascertaining all her habits, of waiting for her for hours outside her door
or at a tram-halt, of sending her gifts of flowers, and so on. It was evident that this one interest had
swallowed up all others in the girl’s mind. She did not trouble herself any further with educational studies,
thought nothing of social functions or girlish pleasures, and kept up relations only with a few girl friends who
could help her in the matter or serve as confidantes. The parents could not say to what lengths their
daughter had gone in her relations with the questionable lady, whether the limits of devoted admiration had
already been exceeded or not. They had never remarked in their daughter any interest in young men, nor
pleasure in their attentions, while, on the other hand, they were sure that her present attachment to a
woman was only a continuation, in a more marked degree, of a feeling she had displayed of recent years
for other members of her own sex which had already aroused her father’s suspicion and anger.

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There were two details of her behaviour, in apparent contrast with each other, that most especially vexed
her parents. On the one hand, she did not scruple to appear in the most frequented streets in the company
of her undesirable friend, being thus quite neglectful of her own reputation; while, on the other hand, she
disdained no means of deception, no excuses and no lies that would make meetings with her possible and
cover them. She thus showed herself too open in one respect and full of deceitfulness in the other. One day
it happened, indeed, as was sooner or later inevitable in the circumstances, that the father met his daughter
in the company of the lady, about whom he had come to know. He passed them by with an angry glance
which boded no good. Immediately afterwards the girl rushed off and flung herself over a wall down the side
of a cutting on to the suburban railway line which ran close by. She paid for this undoubtedly serious
attempt at suicide with a considerable time on her back in bed, though fortunately little permanent damage
was done. After her recovery she found it easier to get her own way than before. The parents did not dare
to oppose her with so much determination, and the lady, who up till then had received her advances coldly,
was moved by such an unmistakable proof of serious passion and began to treat her in a more friendly
manner.

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About six months after this episode the parents sought medical advice and entrusted the physician with
the task of bringing their daughter back to a normal state of mind. The girl’s attempted suicide had evidently
shown them that strong disciplinary measures at home were powerless to overcome her disorder. Before
going further, however, it will be desirable to deal separately with the attitudes of her father and of her
mother to the matter. The father was an earnest, worthy man, at bottom very tender-hearted, but he had to
some extent estranged his children by the sternness he had adopted towards them. His treatment of his
only daughter was too much influenced by consideration for his wife. When he first came to know of his
daughter’s homosexual tendencies he flew into a rage and tried to suppress them by threats. At that time
perhaps he hesitated between different, though equally distressing, views - regarding her either as vicious,
as degenerate, or as mentally afflicted. Even after the attempted suicide he did not achieve the lofty
resignation shown by one of our medical colleagues who remarked of a similar irregularity in his own family:
‘Well, it’s just a misfortune like any other.’ There was something about his daughter’s homosexuality that
aroused the deepest bitterness in him, and he was determined to combat it with all the means in his power.
The low estimation in which psycho-analysis is so generally held in Vienna did not prevent him from turning
to it for help. If this way failed he still had in reserve his strongest counter-measure: a speedy marriage was
to awaken the natural instincts of the girl and stifle her unnatural tendencies.

The mother’s attitude towards the girl was not so easy to grasp. She was still a youngish woman, who
was evidently unwilling to give up her own claims to attractiveness. All that was clear was that she did not
take her daughter’s infatuation so tragically as did the father, nor was she so incensed at it. She had even
for some time enjoyed her daughter's confidence concerning her passion. Her opposition to it seemed to
have been aroused mainly by the harmful publicity with which the girl displayed her feelings. She had
herself suffered for some years from neurotic troubles and enjoyed a great deal of consideration from her
husband; she treated her children in quite different ways, being decidedly harsh towards her daughter and
over-indulgent to her three sons, the youngest of whom had been born after a long interval and was then
not yet three years old. It was not easy to ascertain anything more definite about her character, for, owing
to motives that will only later become intelligible, the patient was always reserved in what she said about
her mother, whereas in regard to her father there was no question of this.

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To a physician who was to undertake psycho-analytic treatment of the girl there were many grounds for
misgiving. The situation he had to deal with was not the one that analysis demands, in which alone it can
demonstrate its effectiveness. As is well known, the ideal situation for analysis is when someone who is
otherwise his own master is suffering from an inner conflict which he is unable to resolve alone, so that he
brings his trouble to the analyst and begs for his help. The physician then works hand in hand with one
portion of the pathologically divided personality, against the other party in the conflict. Any situation which
differs from this is to a greater or lesser degree unfavourable for psycho-analysis and adds fresh difficulties
to the internal ones already present. Situations like that of a prospective house-owner who orders an
architect to build him a villa to his own tastes and requirements, or of a pious donor who commissions an
artist to paint a sacred picture in the corner of which is to be a portrait of himself in adoration, are at bottom
incompatible with the conditions necessary for psycho-analysis. Thus, it constantly happens that a husband
instructs the physician as follows: ‘My wife suffers from nerves, and for that reason gets on badly with me;
please cure her, so that we may lead a happy married life again.’ But often enough it turns out that such a
request is impossible to fulfil - that is to say, the physician cannot bring about the result for which the
husband sought the treatment. As soon as the wife is freed from her neurotic inhibitions she sets about
getting a separation, for her neurosis was the sole condition under which the marriage could be maintained.
Or else parents expect one to cure their nervous and unruly child. By a healthy child they mean one who
never causes his parents trouble, and gives them nothing but pleasure. The physician may succeed in
curing the child, but after that it goes its own way all the more decidedly, and the parents are now far more
dissatisfied than before. In short, it is not a matter of indifference whether someone comes to analysis of his
own accord or because he is brought to it - whether it is he himself who desires to be changed, or only his
relatives, who love him (or who might be expected to love him).

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Further unfavourable features in the present case were the facts that the girl was not in any way ill (she
did not suffer from anything in herself, nor did she complain of her condition) and that the task to be carried
out did not consist in resolving a neurotic conflict but in converting one variety of the genital organization of
sexuality into the other. Such an achievement - the removal of genital inversion or homosexuality - is in my
experience never an easy matter. On the contrary, I have found success possible only in specially
favourable circumstances, and even then the success essentially consisted in making access to the
opposite sex (which had hitherto been barred) possible to a person restricted to homosexuality, thus
restoring his full bisexual functions. After that it lay with him to choose whether he wished to abandon the
path that is banned by society, and in some cases he has done so. One must remember that normal
sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object. In general, to undertake to convert a fully
developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse,
except that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted.

The number of successes achieved by psycho-analytic treatment of the various forms of homosexuality,
which incidentally are manifold, is indeed not very striking. As a rule the homosexual is not able to give up
the object which provides him with pleasure, and one cannot convince him that if he made the change he
would rediscover in the other object the pleasure that he has renounced, and such components of the
instinct of self-preservation prove themselves too weak in the struggle against the sexual impulsions. One
then soon discovers his secret plan, namely, to obtain from the striking failure of his attempt a feeling of
satisfaction that he has done everything possible against his abnormality, to which he can now resign
himself with an easy conscience. The case is somewhat different when consideration for beloved parents
and relatives has been the motive for his attempt to be cured. Here there really are libidinal impulsions
present which may put forth energies opposed themselves to the homosexual choice of object; but their
strength is rarely sufficient. It is only where the homosexual fixation has not yet become strong enough, or
where there are considerable rudiments and vestiges of a heterosexual choice of object, i.e. in a still
oscillating or in a definitely bisexual organization, that one may make a more favourable prognosis for
psycho-analytic therapy.

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For these reasons I refrained altogether from holding out to the parents any prospect of their wish being
fulfilled. I merely said I was prepared to study the girl carefully for a few weeks or months, so as then to be
able to pronounce how far a continuation of the analysis would be likely to influence her. In quite a number
of cases, indeed, an analysis falls into two clearly distinguishable phases. In the first, the physician
procures from the patient the necessary information, makes him familiar with the premises and postulates
of psycho-analysis, and unfolds to him the reconstruction of the genesis of his disorder as deduced from
the material brought up in the analysis. In the second phase the patient himself gets hold of the material put
before him; he works on it, recollects what he can of the apparently repressed memories, and tries to
repeat the rest as if he were in some way living it over again. In this way he can confirm, supplement, and
correct the inferences made by the physician. It is only during this work that he experiences, through
overcoming resistances, the inner change aimed at, and acquires for himself the convictions that make him
independent of the physician’s authority. These two phases in the course of the analytic treatment are not
always sharply divided from each other; this can only happen when the resistance obeys certain conditions.
But when this is so, one may bring up as an analogy the two stages of a journey. The first comprises all the
necessary preparations, to-day so complicated and hard to effect, before, ticket in hand, one can at last go
on to the platform and secure a seat in the train. One then has the right, and the possibility, of travelling into
a distant country; but after all these preliminary exertions one is not yet there - indeed, one is not a single
mile nearer to one’s goal. For this to happen one has to make the journey itself from one station to the
other, and this part of the performance may well be compared with the second phase of the analysis.

The course of the present patient’s analysis followed this two-phased pattern, but it was not continued
beyond the beginning of the second phase. A special constellation of the resistance made it possible,
nevertheless, to gain full confirmation of my constructions, and to obtain an adequate insight on broad lines
into the way in which her inversion had developed. But before relating the findings of the analysis I must
deal with a few points which have either been touched upon already by myself or which will have roused
special interest in the reader.

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I had made the prognosis partly dependent on how far the girl had succeeded in satisfying her passion.
The information I obtained during the analysis seemed favourable in this respect. With none of the objects
of her adoration had the patient enjoyed anything beyond a few kisses and embraces; her genital chastity, if
one may use such a phrase, had remained intact. As for the demi-mondaine who had roused her most
recent and by far her strongest emotions, she had always been treated coldly by her and never been
allowed any greater favour than to kiss her hand. She was probably making a virtue of necessity when she
kept insisting on the purity of her love and her physical repulsion against the idea of any sexual intercourse.
But perhaps she was not altogether wrong when she boasted of her wonderful beloved that, being of good
birth as she was, and forced into her present position only by adverse family circumstances, she had
preserved, in spite of her situation, much nobility of character. For the lady used to recommend the girl
every time they met to withdraw her affection from herself and from women in general, and she had
persistently rejected the girl’s advances up to the time of the attempted suicide.

A second point, which I at once tried to investigate, concerned any possible motives in the girl herself
which might serve as a support for psycho-analytic treatment. She did not try to deceive me by saying that
she felt any urgent need to be freed from her homosexuality. On the contrary, she said she could not
conceive of any other way of being in love, but she added that for her parents’ sake she would honestly
help in the therapeutic attempt, for it pained her very much to be the cause of so much grief to them. To
begin with, I could not but take this, too, as a propitious sign; for I could not guess the unconscious affective
attitude that lay concealed behind it. What came to light later in this connection decisively influenced the
course taken by the analysis and determined its premature conclusion.

Readers unversed in psycho-analysis will long have been awaiting an answer to two other questions. Did
this homosexual girl show physical characteristics plainly belonging to the opposite sex, and did the case
prove to be one of congenital or acquired (later-developed) homosexuality?

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I am aware of the importance attaching to the first of these questions. But one should not exaggerate it
and allow it to overshadow the fact that sporadic secondary characteristics of the opposite sex are very
often present in normal individuals, and that well-marked physical characteristics of the opposite sex may
be found in persons whose choice of object has undergone no change in the direction of inversion; in other
words, that in both sexes the degree of physical hermaphroditism is to a great extent independent of
psychical hermaphroditism. In modification of these statements it must be added that this independence is
more evident in men than women, where bodily and mental traits belonging to the opposite sex are apt to
coincide. Still I am not in a position to give a satisfactory answer to the first of our questions about my
patient. The psycho-analyst customarily forgoes a thorough physical examination of his patients in certain
cases. Certainly there was no obvious deviation from the feminine physical type, nor any menstrual
disturbance. The beautiful and well-made girl had, it is true, her father’s tall figure, and her facial features
were sharp rather than soft and girlish, traits which might be regarded as indicating a physical masculinity.
Some of her intellectual attributes also could be connected with masculinity: for instance, her acuteness of
comprehension and her lucid objectivity, in so far as she was not dominated by her passion. But these
distinctions are conventional rather than scientific. What is certainly of greater importance is that in her
behaviour towards her love-object she had throughout assumed the masculine part: that is to say, she
displayed the humility and the sublime overvaluation of the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover,
the renunciation of all narcissistic satisfaction, and the preference for being the lover rather than the
beloved. She had thus not only chosen a feminine love-object, but had also developed a masculine attitude
towards that object.

The second question, whether this was a case of congenital or acquired homosexuality, will be answered
by the whole history of the patient’s abnormality and its development. The study of this will show how far
this question is a fruitless and inapposite one.

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II

After this highly discursive introduction I am only able to present a very concise summary of the sexual
history of the case under consideration. In childhood the girl had passed through the normal attitude
characteristic of the feminine Oedipus complex 1 in a way that was not at all remarkable, and had later also
begun to substitute for her father a brother slightly older than herself. She did not remember any sexual
traumas in early life, nor were any discovered by the analysis. Comparison of her brother’s genital organs
and her own, which took place about the beginning of the latency period (at five years old or perhaps a little
earlier), left a strong impression on her and had far-reaching after-effects. There were very few signs
pointing to infantile masturbation, or else the analysis did not go far enough to throw light on this point. The
birth of a second brother when she was between five and six years old exercised no special influence upon
her development. During the pre-pubertal years at school she gradually became acquainted with the facts
of sex, and she received this knowledge with mixed feelings of lasciviousness and frightened aversion, in a
way which may be called normal and was not exaggerated in degree. This amount of information about her
seems meagre enough, nor can I guarantee that it is complete. It may be that the history of her youth was
much richer in experiences; I do not know. As I have already said, the analysis was broken off after a short
time, and therefore yielded an anamnesis not much more reliable than the other anamneses of
homosexuals, which there is good cause to question. Further, the girl had never been neurotic, and came
to the analysis without even one hysterical symptom, so that opportunities for investigating the history of
her childhood did not present themselves so readily as usual.

At the age of thirteen to fourteen she displayed a tender and, according to general opinion, exaggeratedly
strong affection for a small boy, not quite three years old, whom she used to see regularly in a children’s
playground. She took to the child so warmly that in consequence a lasting friendship grew up between
herself and his parents. One may infer from this episode that at that time she was possessed of a strong
desire to be a mother herself and to have a child. However, after a short time she grew indifferent to the
boy, and began to take an interest in mature, but still youthful, women. The manifestations of this interest
soon brought upon her a severe chastisement at the hands of her father.

1 1 do not see any advance or gain in the introduction of the term ‘Electra complex’, and do not advocate its use.

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It was established beyond all doubt that this change occurred simultaneously with a certain event in the
family, and one may therefore look to this for some explanation of the change. Before it happened, her
libido was concentrated on a maternal attitude, while afterwards she became a homosexual attracted to
mature women, and remained so ever since. The event which is so significant for our understanding of the
case was a new pregnancy of her mother’s, and the birth of a third brother when she was about sixteen.

The position of affairs which I shall now proceed to lay bare is not a product of my inventive powers; it is
based on such trustworthy analytic evidence that I can claim objective validity for it. It was in particular a
series of dreams, interrelated and easy to interpret, that decided me in favour of its reality.

The analysis revealed beyond all shadow of doubt that the lady-love was a substitute for - her mother. It
is true that the lady herself was not a mother, but then she was not the girl’s first love. The first objects of
her affection after the birth of her youngest brother were really mothers, women between thirty and thirty-
five whom she had met with their children during summer holidays or in the family circle of acquaintances in
town. Motherhood as a sine qua non in her love-object was later on given up, because that precondition
was difficult to combine in real life with another one, which grew more and more important. The specially
intense bond with her latest love had still another basis which the girl discovered quite easily one day. Her
lady’s slender figure, severe beauty, and downright manner reminded her of the brother who was a little
older than herself. Her latest choice corresponded, therefore, not only to her feminine but also to her
masculine ideal; it combined satisfaction of the homosexual tendency with that of the heterosexual one. It is
well known that analysis of male homosexuals has in numerous cases revealed the same combination,
which should warn us not to form too simple a conception of the nature and genesis of inversion, and to
keep in mind the universal bisexuality of human beings . 1

1 Cf. Sadger (1914).

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But how are we to understand the fact that it was precisely the birth of a child who came late in the family
(at a time when the girl herself was already mature and had strong wishes of her own) that moved her to
bestow her passionate tenderness upon the woman who gave birth to this child, i. e. her own mother, and
to express that feeling towards a substitute for her mother? From all that we know we should have
expected just the opposite. In such circumstances mothers with daughters of nearly a marriageable age
usually feel embarrassed in regard to them, while the daughters are apt to feel for their mothers a mixture
of compassion, contempt and envy which does nothing to increase their tenderness for them. The girl we
are considering had in any case altogether little cause to feel affection for her mother. The latter, still
youthful herself, saw in her rapidly developing daughter an inconvenient competitor; she favoured the sons
at her expense, limited her independence as much as possible, and kept an especially strict watch against
any close relation between the girl and her father. A yearning from the beginning for a kinder mother would,
therefore, have been quite intelligible, but why it should have flared up just then, and in the form of a
consuming passion, is hard to understand.

The explanation is as follows. It was just when the girl was experiencing the revival of her infantile
Oedipus complex at puberty that she suffered her great disappointment. She became keenly conscious of
the wish to have a child, and a male one; that what she desired was her father's child and an image of him,
her consciousness was not allowed to know. And what happened next? It was not she who bore the child,
but her unconsciously hated rival, her mother. Furiously resentful and embittered, she turned away from her
father and from men altogether. After this first great reverse she forswore her womanhood and sought
another goal for her libido.

In doing so she behaved just as many men do who after a first distressing experience turn their backs
forever upon the faithless female sex and become woman-haters. It is related of one of the most attractive
and unfortunate princely figures of our time that he became a homosexual because the lady he was
engaged to marry betrayed him with another man. I do not know whether this is true historically, but an
element of psychological truth lies behind the rumour. In all of us, throughout life, the libido normally
oscillates between male and female objects; the bachelor gives up his men friends when he marries, and
returns to club-life when married life has lost its savour. Naturally, when the swing-over is fundamental and
final, we suspect the presence of some special factor which definitely favours one side or the other, and
which perhaps has only waited for the appropriate moment in order to turn the choice of object in its
direction.

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After her disappointment, therefore, this girl had entirely repudiated her wish for a child, her love of men,
and the feminine role in general. It is evident that at this point a number of very different things might have
happened. What actually happened was the most extreme case. She changed into a man and took her
mother in place of her father as the object of her love . 1 Her relation to her mother had certainly been
ambivalent from the beginning, and it proved easy to revive her earlier love for her mother and with its help
to bring about an overcompensation for her current hostility towards her. Since there was little to be done
with the real mother, there arose from this transformation of feeling the search for a substitute mother to
whom she could become passionately attached . 2

1 It is by no means rare for a love-relation to be broken off through a process of identification on the part of the lover
with the loved object, a process equivalent to a kind of regression to narcissism. After this has been accomplished, it is
easy in making a fresh choice of object to direct the libido to a member of the sex opposite to that of the earlier choice.

2 The displacements of the libido here described are doubtless familiar to every analyst from investigation of the
anamneses of neurotics. With the latter, however, they occur in early childhood, at the time of the early efflorescence of
erotic life; with our patient, who was in no way neurotic, they took place in the first years following puberty, though,
incidentally, they were just as completely unconscious. Perhaps one day this temporal factor may turn out to be of great
importance.

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There was, in addition, a practical motive for this change, derived from her real relations with her mother,
which served as a gain from her illness. The mother herself still attached great value to the attentions and
the admiration of men. If, then, the girl became homosexual and left men to her mother (in other words,
‘retired in favour of her mother), she would remove something which had hitherto been partly responsible
for her mother’s dislike . 1

This libidinal position of the girl’s, thus arrived at, was greatly reinforced as soon as she perceived how
much it displeased her father. After she had been punished for her over-affectionate attitude to a woman
she realized how she could wound her father and take revenge on him. Henceforth she remained
homosexual out of defiance against her father. Nor did she scruple to lie to him and to deceive him in every
way. Towards her mother, indeed, she was only so far deceitful as was necessary to prevent her father
from knowing things. I had the impression that her behaviour followed the principle of the talion: ‘Since you
have betrayed me, you must put up with my betraying you.' Nor can I come to any other conclusion about
the striking lack of caution displayed by this otherwise exceedingly shrewd girl. She wanted her father to
know occasionally of her relations with the lady, otherwise she would be deprived of the satisfaction of her
keenest desire - namely, revenge. So she saw to this by showing herself openly in the company of her
adored one, by walking with her in the streets near her father’s place of business, and the like. This
maladroitness, moreover, was by no means unintentional. It was remarkable, too, that both parents
behaved as if they understood their daughter’s secret psychology. The mother was tolerant, as though she
appreciated her daughter's ‘retirement’ as a favour to her; the father was furious, as though he realized the
deliberate revenge directed against himself.

The girl’s inversion, however, received its final reinforcement when she found in her ‘lady’ an object which
promised to satisfy not only her homosexual trends, but also that part of her heterosexual libido which was
still attached to her brother.

1 As ‘retiring in favour of someone else’ has not previously been mentioned among the causes of homosexuality, or in
the mechanism of libidinal fixation in general, I will adduce here another analytic observation of the same kind which
has a special feature of interest. I once knew two twin brothers, both of whom were endowed with strong libidinal
impulses. One of them was very successful with women, and had innumerable affairs with women and girls. The other
went the same way at first, but it became unpleasant for him to be trespassing on his brother’s preserves, and, owing to
the likeness between them, to be mistaken for him on intimate occasions; so he got out of the difficulty by becoming
homosexual. He left the women to his brother, and thus retired in his favour. Another time I treated a youngish man, an
artist, unmistakably bisexual in disposition, in whom the homosexual trend had come to the fore simultaneously with a
disturbance in his work. He fled from both women and work together. The analysis, which was able to bring him back to
both, showed that fear of his father was the most powerful psychical motive for both the disturbances, which were really
renunciations. In his imagination all women belonged to his father, and he sought refuge in men out of submission, so
as to retire from the conflict with his father. Such a motivation of the homosexual object-choice must be by no means
uncommon; in the primaeval ages of the human race all women presumably belonged to the father and head of the
primal horde.

Among brothers and sisters who are not twins this ‘retiring’ plays a great part in other spheres as well as in that of
erotic choice. For example, an elder brother studies music and is admired for it; the younger, far more gifted musically,
soon gives up his own musical studies, in spite of his fondness for it, and cannot be persuaded to touch an instrument
again. This is only one example of a very frequent occurrence, and investigation of the motives leading to this
‘retirement’ rather than to open rivalry discloses very complicated conditions in the mind.

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Linear presentation is not a very adequate means of describing complicated mental processes going on
in different layers of the mind. I am therefore obliged to pause in the discussion of the case and treat more
fully and deeply some of the points brought forward above.

I mentioned the fact that in her behaviour to her adored lady the girl had adopted the characteristic
masculine type of love. Her humility and her tender lack of pretensions, ‘che poco spera e nulla chlede ’, her
bliss when she was allowed to accompany the lady a little way and to kiss her hand on parting, her joy
when she heard her praised as beautiful (while any recognition of her own beauty by another person meant
nothing at all to her), her pilgrimages to places once visited by the loved one, the silence of all more
sensual wishes - all these little traits in her resembled the first passionate adoration of a youth for a
celebrated actress whom he regards as far above him, to whom he scarcely dares lift his bashful eyes. The
correspondence with ‘a special type of choice of object made by men’ that I have described elsewhere
(1910b), whose special features I traced to attachment to the mother, held good even to the smallest
details. It may seem remarkable that she was not in the least repelled by the bad reputation of her beloved,
although her own observations sufficiently confirmed the truth of such rumours. She was after all a well-
brought-up and modest girl, who had avoided sexual adventures for herself, and who regarded coarsely
sensual satisfactions as unaesthetic. But already her first passions had been for women who were not
celebrated for specially strict propriety. The first protest her father made against her love-choice had been
evoked by the pertinacity with which she sought the company of a film actress at a summer resort.
Moreover, in all these affairs it had never been a question of women who had any reputation for
homosexuality, and who might, therefore, have offered her some prospect of homosexual satisfaction; on
the contrary, she illogically courted women who were coquettes in the ordinary sense of the word, and she
rejected without hesitation the willing advances made by a homosexual friend of her own age. For her, the
bad reputation of her ‘lady’, however, was positively a ‘necessary condition for love’. All that is enigmatic in
this attitude vanishes when we remember that in the case too of the masculine type of object-choice
derived from the mother it is a necessary condition that the loved object should be in some way or other ‘of
bad repute' sexually - someone who really may be called a cocotte. When the girl learnt later how far her
adored lady deserved this description and that she lived simply by giving her bodily favours, her reaction
took the form of great compassion and of phantasies and plans for ‘rescuing’ her beloved from these
ignoble circumstances. We were struck by the same urge to ‘rescue’ in the men of the type referred to
above, and in my description of it I have tried to give the analytic derivation of this urge.

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We are led into quite another realm of explanation by the analysis of the attempt at suicide, which I must
regard as seriously intended, and which, incidentally, considerably improved her position both with her
parents and with the lady she loved. She went for a walk with her one day in a part of the town and at an
hour at which she was not unlikely to meet her father on his way from his office. So it turned out. Her father
passed them in the street and cast a furious look at her and her companion, about whom he had by that
time come to know. A few moments later she flung herself into the railway cutting. The explanation she
gave of the immediate reasons determining her decision sounded quite plausible. She had confessed to the
lady that the man who had given them such an irate glance was her father, and that he had absolutely
forbidden their friendship. The lady became incensed at this and ordered the girl to leave her then and
there, and never again to wait for her or to address her - the affair must now come to an end. In her despair
at having thus lost her loved one for ever, she wanted to put an end to herself. The analysis, however, was
able to disclose another and deeper interpretation behind the one she gave, which was confirmed by the
evidence of her own dreams. The attempted suicide was, as might have been expected, determined by two
other motives besides the one she gave: it was the fulfilment of a punishment (self-punishment), and the
fulfilment of a wish. As the latter it meant the attainment of the very wish which, when frustrated, had driven
her into homosexuality - namely, the wish to have a child by her father, for now she ‘fell’ through her
father’s fault . 1 The fact that at that moment the lady had spoken in just the same terms as her father, and
had uttered the same prohibition, forms the connecting link between this deep interpretation and the
superficial one of which the girl herself was conscious. From the point of view of self-punishment the girl’s
action shows us that she had developed in her unconscious strong death-wishes against one or other of
her parents - perhaps against her father, out of revenge for impeding her love, but more probably against
her mother too, when she was pregnant with the little brother. For analysis has explained the enigma of
suicide in the following way: probably no one finds the mental energy required to kill himself unless, in the
first place, in doing so he is at the same time killing an object with whom he has identified himself, and, in
the second place, is turning against himself a death-wish which had been directed against someone else.
Nor need the regular discovery of these unconscious death-wishes in those who have attempted suicide
surprise us (any more than it ought to make us think that it confirms our deductions), since the unconscious
of all human beings is full enough of such death-wishes, even against those they love . 2 Since the girl
identified herself with her mother, who should have died at the birth of the child denied to herself, this
punishment-fulfilment itself was once again a wish-fulfilment. Finally, the discovery that several quite
different motives, all of great strength, must have co-operated to make such a deed possible is only in
accordance with what we should expect.

1 That the various methods of suicide can represent sexual wish-fulfilments has long been known to all analysts. (To
poison oneself = to become pregnant; to drown - to bear a child; to throw oneself from a height = to be delivered of a
child.)

2 Cf. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915b).

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In the girl’s account of her conscious motives the father did not figure at all; there was not even any
mention of fear of his anger. In the motives laid bare by the analysis, on the other hand, he played the
principal part. Her relation to her father had the same decisive importance for the course and outcome of
the analytic treatment, or rather, analytic exploration. Behind her pretended consideration for her parents,
for whose sake she had been willing to make the attempt to be transformed, lay concealed her attitude of
defiance and revenge against her father which held her fast to her homosexuality. Secure under this cover,
the resistance set a considerable region free to analytic investigation. The analysis went forward almost
without any signs of resistance, the patient participating actively with her intellect, though absolutely tranquil
emotionally. Once when I expounded to her a specially important part of the theory, one touching her
nearly, she replied in an inimitable tone, ‘How very interesting’, as though she were a grande dame being
taken over a museum and glancing through her lorgnon at objects to which she was completely indifferent.
The impression one had of her analysis was not unlike that of a hypnotic treatment, where the resistance
has in the same way withdrawn to a certain boundary line, beyond which it proves to be unconquerable.

The resistance very often pursues similar tactics - Russian tactics, as they might be called - in cases of
obsessional neurosis. For a time, consequently, these cases yield the clearest results and permit a deep
insight into the causation of the symptoms. But presently one begins to wonder how it is that such marked
progress in analytic understanding can be unaccompanied by even the slightest change in the patient’s
compulsions and inhibitions, until at last one perceives that everything that has been accomplished is
subject to a mental reservation of doubt, and that behind this protective barrier the neurosis can feel
secure. ‘It would be all very fine’, thinks the patient, often quite consciously, ‘if I were obliged to believe
what the man says, but there is no question of that, and so long as this is so I need change nothing.’ Then,
when one comes to close quarters with the motives for this doubt, the fight with the resistances breaks out
in earnest.

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In the case of our patient, it was not doubt but the affective factor of revenge against her father that made
her cool reserve possible, that divided the analysis into two distinct phases, and rendered the results of the
first phase so complete and perspicuous. It seemed, further, as though nothing resembling a transference
to the physician had been effected. That, however, is of course absurd, or, at least, is a loose way of
expressing things. For some kind of relation to the analyst must come into being, and this relation is almost
always transferred from an infantile one. In reality she transferred to me the sweeping repudiation of men
which had dominated her ever since the disappointment she had suffered from her father. Bitterness
against men is as a rule easy to gratify upon the physician; it need not evoke any violent emotional
manifestations, it simply expresses itself by rendering futile all his endeavours and - by clinging to the
illness. I know from experience how difficult it is to make a patient understand just precisely this mute kind
of symptomatic behaviour and to make him aware of this latent, and often exceedingly strong, hostility
without endangering the treatment. As soon, therefore, as I recognized the girl’s attitude to her father, I
broke off the treatment and advised her parents that if they set store by the therapeutic procedure it should
be continued by a woman doctor. The girl had in the meanwhile promised her father that at any rate she
would give up seeing the ‘lady’, and I do not know whether my advice, the reasons for which are obvious,
will be followed.

There was a single piece of material in the course of this analysis which I could regard as a positive
transference, as a greatly weakened revival of the girl’s original passionate love for her father. Even this
manifestation was not quite free from other motives, but I mention it because it brings up, in another
direction, an interesting problem of analytic technique. At a certain period, not long after the treatment had
begun, the girl brought a series of dreams which, distorted according to rule and couched in the usual
dream-language, could nevertheless be easily translated with certainty. Their content, when interpreted,
was, however, remarkable. They anticipated the cure of the inversion through the treatment, expressed her
joy over the prospects in life that would then be opened before her, confessed her longing for a man’s love
and for children, and so might have been welcomed as a gratifying preparation for the desired change. The
contradiction between them and the girl’s utterances in waking life at the time was very great. She did not
conceal from me that she meant to marry, but only in order to escape from her father’s tyranny and to follow
her true inclinations undisturbed. As for the husband, she remarked rather contemptuously, she would
easily deal with him, and besides, one could have sexual relations with a man and a woman at one and the
same time, as the example of the adored lady showed. Warned through some slight impression or other, I
told her one day that I did not believe these dreams, that I regarded them as false or hypocritical, and that
she intended to deceive me just as she habitually deceived her father. I was right; after I had made this
clear, this kind of dream ceased. But I still believe that, beside the intention to mislead me, the dreams
partly expressed the wish to win my favour; they were also an attempt to gain my interest and my good
opinion - perhaps in order to disappoint me all the more thoroughly later on.

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I can imagine that to point out the existence of lying dreams of this kind, ‘obliging’ dreams, will arouse a
positive storm of helpless indignation in some readers who call themselves analysts. ‘What!’ they will
exclaim, ‘the unconscious, the real centre of our mental life, the part of us that is so much nearer the divine
than our poor consciousness - it too can lie! Then how can we still build on the interpretations of analysis
and the accuracy of our findings?’ To which one must reply that the recognition of these lying dreams does
not constitute any shattering novelty. I know, indeed, that the craving of mankind for mysticism is
ineradicable, and that it makes ceaseless efforts to win back for mysticism the territory it has been deprived
of by The Interpretation of Dreams, but surely in the case under consideration everything is simple enough.
A dream is not the ‘unconscious’; it is the form into which a thought left over from preconscious, or even
from conscious, waking life, can, thanks to the favouring state of sleep, be recast. In the state of sleep this
thought has been reinforced by unconscious wishful impulses and has thus experienced distortion through
the dream-work, which is determined by the mechanisms prevailing in the unconscious. With our dreamer,
the intention to mislead me, just as she did her father, certainly emanated from the preconscious, and may
indeed have been conscious; it could come to expression by entering into connection with the unconscious
wishful impulse to please her father (or father-substitute), and in this way it created a lying dream. The two
intentions, to betray and to please her father, originated in the same complex; the former resulted from the
repression of the latter, and the later one was brought back by the dream-work to the earlier one. There can
therefore be no question of any devaluation of the unconscious, nor of a shattering of our confidence in the
results of analysis.

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I cannot neglect this opportunity of expressing for once my astonishment that human beings can go
through such great and important moments of their erotic life without noticing them much, sometimes even,
indeed, without having the faintest suspicion of their existence, or else, having become aware of those
moments, deceive themselves so thoroughly in their judgement of them. This happens not only under
neurotic conditions, where we are familiar with the phenomenon, but seems also to be common enough in
ordinary life. In the present case, for example, a girl develops a sentimental adoration for women, which her
parents at first find merely vexatious and hardly take seriously; she herself knows quite well that she is very
much occupied with these relationships, but still she experiences few of the sensations of intense love until
a particular frustration is followed by a quite excessive reaction, which shows everyone concerned that they
have to do with a consuming passion of elemental strength. Nor had the girl ever perceived anything of the
state of affairs which was a necessary preliminary to the outbreak of this mental storm. In other cases, too,
we come across girls or women in a state of severe depression, who on being asked for a possible cause
of their condition tell us that they have, it is true, had a slight feeling for a certain person, but that it was
nothing deep and that they soon got over it when they had to give it up. And yet it was this renunciation,
apparently so easily borne, that became the cause of serious mental disturbance. Again, we come across
men who have passed through casual love-affairs and realize only from the subsequent effects that they
had been passionately in love with the person whom they had apparently regarded lightly. One is also
amazed at the unexpected results that may follow an artificial abortion, the killing of an unborn child, which
had been decided upon without remorse and without hesitation. It must be admitted that poets are right in
liking to portray people who are in love without knowing it, or uncertain whether they do love, or who think
that they hate when in reality they love. It would seem that the information received by our consciousness
about our erotic life is especially liable to be incomplete, full of gaps, or falsified. Needless to say, in this
discussion I have not omitted to allow for the part played by subsequent forgetting.

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IV

I now come back, after this digression, to the consideration of my patient’s case. We have made a survey
of the forces which led the girl’s libido from the normal Oedipus attitude into that of homosexuality, and of
the psychical paths traversed by it in the process. Most important in this respect was the impression made
by the birth of her little brother, and we might from this be inclined to classify the case as one of late-
acquired inversion.

But at this point we become aware of a state of things which also confronts us in many other instances in
which light has been thrown by psycho-analysis on a mental process. So long as we trace the development
from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an
insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start
from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final result, then we no longer
get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have been otherwise determined.
We notice at once that there might have been another result, and that we might have been just as well able
to understand and explain the latter. The synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis; in other
words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the result.

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It is very easy to account for this disturbing state of affairs. Even supposing that we have a complete
knowledge of the aetiological factors that decide a given result, nevertheless what we know about them is
only their quality, and not their relative strength. Some of them are suppressed by others because they are
too weak, and they therefore do not affect the final result. But we never know beforehand which of the
determining factors will prove the weaker or the stronger. We only say at the end that those which
succeeded must have been the stronger. Hence the chain of causation can always be recognized with
certainty if we follow the line of analysis, whereas to predict it along the line of synthesis is impossible.

We do not, therefore, mean to maintain that every girl who experiences a disappointment such as this of
the longing for love that springs from the Oedipus attitude at puberty will necessarily on that account fall a
victim to homosexuality. On the contrary, other kinds of reaction to this trauma are undoubtedly commoner.
If so, however, there must have been present in this girl special factors that turned the scale, factors
outside the trauma, probably of an internal nature. Nor is there any difficulty in pointing them out.

It is well known that even in a normal person it takes a certain time before the decision in regard to the
sex of the love object is finally made. Homosexual enthusiasms, exaggeratedly strong friendships tinged
with sensuality, are common enough in both sexes during the first years after puberty. This was also so
with our patient, but in her these tendencies undoubtedly showed themselves to be stronger, and lasted
longer, than with others. In addition, these presages of later homosexuality had always occupied her
conscious life, while the attitude arising from the Oedipus complex had remained unconscious and had
appeared only in such signs as her tender behaviour to the little boy. As a school-girl she had been for a
long time in love with a strict and unapproachable mistress, obviously a substitute mother. She had taken a
specially lively interest in a number of young mothers long before her brother’s birth and therefore all the
more certainly long before the first reprimand from her father. From very early years, therefore, her libido
had flowed in two currents, the one on the surface being one that we may unhesitatingly designate as
homosexual. This latter was probably a direct and unchanged continuation of an infantile fixation on her
mother. Possibly the analysis described here actually revealed nothing more than the process by which, on
an appropriate occasion, the deeper heterosexual current of libido, too, was deflected into the manifest
homosexual one.

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The analysis showed, further, that the girl had brought along with her from her childhood a strongly
marked ‘masculinity complex’. A spirited girl, always ready for romping and fighting, she was not at all
prepared to be second to her slightly older brother; after inspecting his genital organs she had developed a
pronounced envy for the penis, and the thoughts derived from this envy still continued to fill her mind. She
was in fact a feminist; she felt it to be unjust that girls should not enjoy the same freedom as boys, and
rebelled against the lot of woman in general. At the time of the analysis the idea of pregnancy and child-
birth was disagreeable to her, partly, I surmise, on account of the bodily disfigurement connected with them.
Her girlish narcissism had fallen back on this defence , 1 and ceased to express itself as pride in her good
looks. Various clues indicated that she must formerly have had strong exhibitionist and scopophilic
tendencies. Anyone who is anxious that the claims of acquired as opposed to hereditary factors should not
be under-estimated in aetiology will call attention to the fact that the girl’s behaviour, as described above,
was exactly what would follow from the combined effect in a person with a strong mother-fixation of the two
influences of her mother’s neglect and her comparison of her genital organs with her brother’s. It is possible
here to attribute to the impress of the operation of external influence in early life something which one
would have liked to regard as a constitutional peculiarity. On the other hand, a part even of this acquired
disposition (if it i/i/as really acquired) has to be ascribed to inborn constitution. So we see in practice a
continual mingling and blending of what in theory we should try to separate into a pair of opposites -
namely, inherited and acquired characters.

If the analysis had come to an earlier, still more premature end, it might have led to the view that this was
a case of late acquired homosexuality, but as it is, a consideration of the material impels us to conclude that
it is rather a case of congenital homosexuality which, as usual, became fixed and unmistakably manifest
only in the period following puberty. Each of these classifications does justice only to one part of the state of
affairs ascertainable by observation, but neglects the other. It would be best not to attach too much value to
this way of stating the problem.

1 Cf. Kriemhilde’s admission in the Nibelungenlied.

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The literature of homosexuality usually fails to distinguish clearly enough between the questions of the
choice of object on the one hand, and of the sexual characteristics and sexual attitude of the subject on the
other, as though the answer to the former necessarily involved the answers to the latter. Experience,
however, proves the contrary: a man with predominantly male characteristics and also masculine in his
erotic life may still be inverted in respect to his object, loving only men instead of women. A man in whose
character feminine attributes obviously predominate, who may, indeed, behave in love like a woman, might
be expected, from this feminine attitude, to choose a man for his love-object; but he may nevertheless be
heterosexual, and show no more inversion in respect to his object than an average normal man. The same
is true of women; here also mental sexual character and object-choice do not necessarily coincide. The
mystery of homosexuality is therefore by no means so simple as it is commonly depicted in popular
expositions - ‘a feminine mind, bound therefore to love a man, but unhappily attached to a masculine body;
a masculine mind, irresistibly attracted by women, but, alas! imprisoned in a feminine body’. It is instead a
question of three sets of characteristics, namely -

Physical sexual characters
(physical hermaphroditism)

Mental sexual characters
(masculine or feminine attitude)

Kind of object-choice

which, up to a certain point, vary independently of one another, and are met with in different individuals in
manifold permutations. Tendentious literature has obscured our view of this interrelationship by putting into
the foreground, for practical reasons, the third feature (the kind of object-choice), which is the only one that
strikes the layman, and in addition by exaggerating the closeness of the association between this and the
first feature. Moreover, it blocks the way to a deeper insight into all that is uniformly designated as
homosexuality, by rejecting two fundamental facts which have been revealed by psycho-analytic
investigation. The first of these is that homosexual men have experienced a specially strong fixation on
their mother; the second, that, in addition to their manifest heterosexuality, a very considerable measure of
latent or unconscious homosexuality can be detected in all normal people. If these findings are taken into
account, then, clearly, the supposition that nature in a freakish mood created a ‘third sex’ falls to the
ground.

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It is not for psycho-analysis to solve the problem of homosexuality. It must rest content with disclosing the
psychical mechanisms that resulted in determining the object-choice, and with tracing back the paths from
them to the instinctual dispositions. There its work ends, and it leaves the rest to biological research, which
has recently brought to light, through Steinach’s 1 experiments, such very important results concerning the
influence exerted by the first set of characteristics mentioned above upon the second and third. Psycho-
analysis has a common basis with biology, in that it presupposes an original bisexuality in human beings
(as in animals). But psycho-analysis cannot elucidate the intrinsic nature of what in conventional or in
biological phraseology is termed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’: it simply takes over the two concepts and
makes them the foundation of its work. When we attempt to reduce them further, we find masculinity
vanishing into activity and femininity into passivity, and that does not tell us enough. I have already tried to
explain how far we may reasonably expect, or how far experience has already proved, that the work of
elucidation which is part of the task of analysis furnishes us with the means of effecting a modification of
inversion. When one compares the extent to which we can influence it with the remarkable transformations
that Steinach has effected in some cases by his operations, it does not make a very imposing impression.
But it would be premature, or a harmful exaggeration, if at this stage we were to indulge in hopes of a
‘therapy’ of inversion that could be generally applied. The cases of male homosexuality in which Steinach
has been successful fulfilled the condition, which is not always present, of a very patent physical
‘hermaphroditism’. Any analogous treatment of female homosexuality is at present quite obscure. If it were
to consist in removing what are probably hermaphroditic ovaries, and in grafting others, which are hoped to
be of a single sex, there would be little prospect of its being applied in practice. A woman who has felt
herself to be a man, and has loved in masculine fashion, will hardly let herself be forced into playing the
part of a woman, when she must pay for this transformation, which is not in every way advantageous, by
renouncing all hope of motherhood.

1 Cf. Lipschutz (1919).